1005. You asked, so I have a brief history of English from invading Germanic tribes to the Modern English era. We talk about Vikings, the Norman Conquest, the Black Death, the Tyndale Bible, the printing press, and more.
1005. You asked, so I have a brief history of English from invading Germanic tribes to the Modern English era. We talk about Vikings, the Norman Conquest, the Black Death, the Tyndale Bible, the printing press, and more.
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Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. After I recently mentioned that I was surprised when I learned that French was the official language of England for hundreds of years, Stephen Bell on Mastodon asked if I had ever done a show on the topic, and I had not! No idea why because it's a great topic, so I'll do it today. Thanks for asking, Stephen!
But before we get started, I have an announcement for the people who normally listen to the show using Google Podcasts. That service is shutting down soon, so if you want to keep listening — and I hope you do! — you can find Grammar Girl on all the other podcasting platforms including Apple Podcast, Spotify, Castbox, Overcast, Pocketcasts, Samsung Podcasts, YouTube, and more. So don't despair! And don't let Google stop you from listening to podcasts. Find another podcast home and search for Grammar Girl.
OLD ENGLISH
The story of English starts way back in the 5th century, after the end of the Roman Empire when the indigenous Celts who lived in Great Britain were losing a war and invited three Germanic tribes to come to their land and help: the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes.
But after they drove out the aggressors, these warriors decided "Hey, this place is kinda nice, and the Celts are pretty weak. Let's just take it for ourselves!"
I'm not quite sure what happened to the Jutes, but eventually the Celts were driven to Scotland and Wales, and the Angles and Saxons took over England and part of Scotland and established the oldest form of English that you might be familiar with: Anglo-Saxon. Anglo-Saxon is just another name for "Old English." In fact, we get the word "English" from the Angles. "Anglish" eventually became "English." There wasn't a lot of literature during this time, at least not much that survived for us to see, but the famous epic poem "Beowulf" is written in Old English.
Now, Old English was very different from Modern English, not only in vocabulary and spelling but also in grammatical structure; for example, nouns had genders like they do in German today, and there were more ways to conjugate verbs than we have today. And many letters we don't pronounce today were pronounced in Old English; for example, the "k" in "knife" (which was spelled "knif") was pronounced, so the word sounded like "kuh-neef."
Although people speaking other languages did exist in England before the Angles and Saxons conquered the region, these Anglo-Saxons stuck with their own language and didn't adopt very many words from these predecessors. In fact, very few English words are derived from Celtic, although according to the book "The Adventure of English," the Celtic language did survive as Gaelic among the people who were pushed out of England to Wales, Cornwall, and the North of Scotland. Yet, supposedly, no more than 24 words were recruited from Celtic to English and many of them describe landscape features, such as the word "crag," meaning a steep rugged rock. And there are a few location names, for example Dover and London are Celtic names.
Anglo-Saxons called the Celts "Wēalas," from which we get "Welsh," but it meant "foreigner" or "slave." They didn't exactly hold the Celts in high regard.
And as an aside, the word "walnut" comes from the same Old English word that meant "foreign." The walnut was a foreign nut because it was grown in Gaul and Italy.
Spelling in Old English was essentially phonetic and random. Spellings weren't nailed down until much, much later.
And Old English was written in runes until the introduction of the Latin alphabet in the 9th century or so.
When I read about pronunciation, I always wonder how they know what the pronunciations were since we don't have recordings from that time, and the most common answer is that pronunciation is inferred from the surviving poetry. By seeing what rhymes, linguists can make educated guesses about pronunciation.
Many of our common, simple, guttural sounding words in English today came from Old English: the most basic verbs ("is," "come," and "go"), words for relationships ("son," "daughter," and "friend,"), words for animals ("horse," "cow" and "fish"), words for body parts ("eyes," "ears," "mouth," "nose"), words that describe daily living ("house," "home," "drink," … "plow," "wood," "field," … "day," "night," and "sun"), and so on. Again, according to "The Adventure of English," almost all of the 100 most used words in English come from Old English.
THE VIKING INFLUENCE
Old English was the dominant language for hundreds of years, but then in the 9th and 10th centuries Vikings invaded the eastern coast of England and Scotland and left parts of their language, including words such as "sky," "skin," "cake," "bleak," "egg," "leg," and "ugly."
When you look at the etymology of words in the dictionary, you'll notice that some come from Old Norse, and that's the Vikings' influence.
MIDDLE ENGLISH — THE NORMAN CONQUEST
And next, what may be the most important event in the development of English happened in 1066: The Norman Conquest. In 1066 the king of England died — King Edward — and multiple people had some kind of claim on the throne. Others also attacked, but William, the Duke of Normandy, invaded with a French army and won, bringing the French language to England with him. And he became known as William the Conqueror.
The Latin alphabet had completely replaced ruins by this time, and this period roughly marks the transition from Old English to Middle English.
Now, although the common people continued to speak some form of English, and English retained some vestigial official uses, the official language of England essentially became Norman French. William had installed Normans in almost all the upper-class positions in the country, and the government was run in French. They spoke French at court, and I believe the clerics mainly spoke French. So although the common people still spoke English, everyone who was anyone spoke French. The amount of written English rapidly declined, and this situation went on for hundreds of years.
The English spoken from 1066 — the Norman Conquest — to 1500 is called Middle English. And English writing didn't totally disappear; after a time, it began to rise again, and this was the era that gave us "The Canterbury Tales" by Chaucer, who died in 1400.
Pronunciation was still very different in Middle English, and most letters were pronounced. For example, "knight," like "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," was pronounced "cnicht"; the inflectional word endings were usually pronounced, so "warned" was pronounced "warn-ed"; and many words still had an "e" on the end that was pronounced, so "heart" (spelled "herte") was pronounced something like "hair-tuh."
When you're in England today, you notice all the castles, and this started with the Normans. After the Conquest, they built a lot of castles. In fact, the word "castle" comes to English from the French.
And many other [quote-unquote] "upper-class" words came into English during this time from French ("baron," "noble," and "messenger"), many words for cooking ("sauce," "toast," "pastry," and "feast"), and governmental words such as "parliament," "tax," "judge," and "jury."
The French influence from this time is also why we have some phrases that follow the French pattern of putting an adjective after a noun for official titles, such as "attorney general," "mother superior," and "notary public."
Many Latin words also came into English through the French of this time.
One reason we have so many synonyms in English is that the words from both Old English and the French survived. We have the French "assemble" and the Old English "meet." The French "heal" and the Old English "cure." The French "dirt" and the Old English "soil." The French "desire" and the Old English "want." "Love" and "adore, "help" and "assist." The list goes on and on. The most well known are those for animals. The commoners working on the farms has one word for them ("calf," "pig," "chicken," and "deer") and the nobles eating them at their fancy feasts had other words for them ("veal," "pork," "poultry," and "venison").
The 1100s were probably the lowest point for English in the years we now call the time of Middle English. During this time, while English was mainly the language of the lower class, massive dialect variations emerged.
Through much of the 1200s, England is said to have been trilingual, with French, English, and Latin all having a role: French for the ruling class, English for the masses, and Latin for the church.
Then came the Black Death. The biggest outbreak in England happened in 1348, killing a huge number of people. Estimates vary, but it's common to see numbers between 30% and 60% of the population, which of course, was massively disruptive to society, causing labor shortages and unprecedented opportunities for advancement, decimating some of the Norman aristocratic families, and generally leading to more interactions between people who spoke English and people who spoke French.
The Hundred Years War between England and France, which started around the same time, also dampened enthusiasm for French in England.
In 1362, the Statue of Pleading made English the official language of the courts again, and by the end of the 1300s, the English language had fully reasserted itself. In 1399, when Henry IV took his coronation oath in English, he was the first English king to do so since the Norman Conquest more than 300 years earlier.
Now, jumping forward to 1470, William Caxton introduced the printing press to England after Gutenberg invented it in Germany a couple of decades earlier. Caxton printed such notable works as Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" and "Le Morte de Arthur," and he did a lot to begin the standardization of English spelling. He chose a dialect that became the standard, and he partially froze English at a specific point in its grammatical development.
For example around Caxon's time the plural and singular of "sheep" had combined into one. You have one sheep or many sheep. Well, earlier there had been two words. One book I read speculated that English may have continued to evolve so that most words combined their singular and plural forms as happened with "sheep" but that Caxton froze the language enough with his printing press to keep that from happening.
Around this time (Caxton's time) English lost most of the plurals that end with "n." Only a few remain, such as "oxen" and "children," but before this time there'd been many more. If Caxton and his printing press had been introduced 50 years later, we might have lost those few survivors too.
There were also some grammatical trends that didn't survive to modern English, for example, using nouns, verbs, and adverbs interchangeably. For example, they would use "happy" as a verb and say "to happy a friend" and use "malice" as a verb as in "to malice an enemy."
And note that I said Caxton BEGAN the process of standardizing English spelling. It was still a mess at this time and after.
EARLY MODERN ENGLISH
Early Modern English — Shakespeare's time and the era of the King James Bible — is said to have begun around 1500, and spellings still weren't strictly standardized.
Another important event in English came around 1522 when William Tyndale began translating the Bible directly from Greek and Hebrew into English, an act for which he was persecuted, driven from England, prosecuted, and eventually burned at the stake. The church viewed having the Bible available in the language of the people as a threat, and Tyndale ticked off King Henry the VIII by issuing writings opposing his divorce. He had a great flair for words, though, and his translation included many sayings we still use today, including "the powers that be" "filthy lucre" "gave up the ghost," "the salt of the earth" and "my brother's keeper."
Showing his hypocrisy, despite having Tyndale put to death for making an English translation of the Bible, Henry the VIII authorized an English Bible very soon after Tyndale's death (I think maybe days after?), and in 1539, the Great Bible written in English by Coverdale, and largely based on Tyndale's Bible, was released not only spreading the good word but, more important for our purposes today, spreading written English.
And much of the King James Bible, published in 1611, is also said to have come from Tyndale's translation. Tyndale was a big deal.
And, with printed books around, people started to think about language more than they had in the past. They began inventing new words at a rapid pace. By 1553 people were inventing so many words, a philosophical battle broke out that lasted more than 100 years called the Inkhorn Controversy. An Inkhorn was literally a horn used to hold ink for writing. Some people were creating fancy sounding words, largely from Latin, like there was no tomorrow, and another contingent thought this was pompous puffery. These new terms were called inkhorn terms. Some of them survived, and you wouldn't think twice about using them today, and others didn't make it and sound very odd. Some survivors — remember these were vehemently objected to — are "capacity," "celebrate," "exaggerate," "extol," "dexterity," "fertile," "native," "confidence," and "relinquish."
Some that didn't survive were "demit" (meaning "to send away"), "incompossible" (meaning "incapable of coexisting"), and "temulent" (meaning "drunk").
Despite the earlier best efforts of Caxton, spelling was still something of a free-for-all in the early 1600s. For example Richard Nordquist the curator of the grammar page at About.com noted that if you had been around in 1600 to send holiday greetings to Shakespeare, you might have spelled "merry," as in "God rest ye merry gentlemen," in any of 30 different ways.
The introduction of the first English dictionaries in the mid-1600s and ultimately the first definitive English dictionary by Samuel Johnson in 1755, made further gains toward standardizing English spelling.
MODERN ENGLISH
Around 1650 there was political upheaval in Britain again, followed by a period of stability, and this year is generally considered to mark the beginning of Modern English.
And at the same time, throughout the 1600's, Britons started settling America, sowing the seeds for the creation of American English.
And that, is a very brief history of the English language.
Finally, I have a familect story from friend of the pod, Rob Reinalda.
Both Teresa and I love to cook, and some years ago I decided to try my hand at chicken paprika, which is a Hungarian dish with chicken and onions and noodles and sour cream and paprika.
And for this dish you use hot Hungarian paprika.
Well, I was cooking it and cooking it, and I was impatient and wanted more heat to the sauce the chicken was cooking in. And so I kept adding the hot Hungarian paprika.,And as it cooked the heat, the spiciness level went way over the top.
So I thought maybe I could salvage it with more sour cream, which we didn't have or more noodles or whatever.,So I put it away — put it into the refrigerator with a note that said, "Do not eat the killer death meat." I think I might have put a skull and crossbones on it. I don't know.
But ever since then anything that is severely spicy over the top in edible is known in our house as "killer death meat."
Thanks, Rob. I love that!
If you'd like to share your familect, you may have noticed that the quality of the calls has been better the last couple of weeks. And I'm working on finding better ways for you to get me your messages. I'm still going to keep the voicemail line open for a while, but I'm also going to look for your voice messages on Threads and in Instagram and Mastodon direct messages. Links to all those places are in the show notes, and they let you record messages of varying lengths, so you might have to break up your story over a couple of messages like Annette did on Threads last week. But this is all part of what the break from Grammar Girl Conversations is about. Beside having a little rest, I'm working on ways to improve the audio quality of both these calls and the interviews. So send me your stories!
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to Morgan Christianson in advertising, Holly Hutchings in operations, Davina Tomlin in marketing, Nathan Semes in audio, and director of podcasts, Brannan Goetschius who is an avid rock climber!
And I’m Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl.
That's all. Thanks for listening.