A Short History of English

Hello everyone. My blog is about the history of English. The English that we speak today is actually a mixture of many different languages; mainly, Old German, French, Latin and Greek. Many of these languages came to England as a result of some kind of conquest or invasion. The history of English is full of violence and war, just like the history of England itself.

Almost one thousand years ago, in the year 1066, England was invaded for the last time, when William the Conqueror, the Norman King defeated the Saxon army at the Battle of Hastings. Before that, England had been invaded by many groups of people at different times, and each group brought their own language with them. Let's have a look at some of these groups of people to understand why English is a mixed up language with words from many different languages.

Originally the British Isles (England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland) were home to people called Celts. There were also Celts in France, Belgium, Holland and the north of Spain. The Celtic language is quite different from English. People still speak it today in Ireland, where it is called Gaelic, and Wales, where it is called Welsh. The only example of a Gaelic word I know is "Gardai" or "Garda" which means Police. "Diolch yn fawr" means thank you very much in Welsh and the Welsh for shoe is "Esgid". I once knew an Irish woman, her name was pronounced Meive but it was spelt Meadbh!

The Celts were very tough people, but they were conquered by the Romans - probably because the Celts also liked to fight each other as well as fight the Romans. The Romans conquered a lot of people and brought their language, Latin, with them to a lot of countries outside of Italy. Modern Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Romanian all come from Latin.
One of the first countries the Romans conquered was Greece. At that time the Greeks were one of the leading societies when it came to learning and knowledge; for example, medicine, architecture and mathematics and engineering. The Romans were very interested in these things and borrowed a lot of words from Greek when they borrowed Greek ideas and Greek learning. Let's have a look at some examples of words that come from Greek that we use in English today:

Psychology (The study of the Mind)
Democracy (A system of government where people choose their leaders)
Thermometer (A medical tool used to check how hot or cold something is)

You can see there are a lot of Greek words used when speaking about science, education, or advanced ideas or philosophy. The Greeks were very advanced people and their ideas were quite sophisticated (the word sophisticated also comes from Greek!). The Romans were very clever in other ways - the saw the benefits of Greek development and simply took them and used them in their own society. The Romans were very successful and this is partly because of their use of Greek ideas. Let's have a look at some Latin words we still use in English today:

Transport (To move something from one place to another)
Interrogate (To ask someone questions in an aggressive, intimidating way)
Elect (People choose the leader of a group by electing someone. In a Democracy we elect our leaders)

Next week, Melanie will talk about Greek and Latin Words in English in more detail. I hope you enjoy it. For my next blog entry next month, we can continue our journey through the history of English. I hope you will join me next month, when we look at the Anglo Saxon invasion of England.

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