Historia del idioma inglés

The History of the English Language

The beginnings of English

The first man to investigate the origin of English was Sir William Jones, who discovered that English came from a “common source” due to the comparison of English with other languages like Sanskrit, Latin and Greek. He said that all these languages came from Proto-Indo-European source. The explanation for the similarities between languages is that they spread with the moving of the different groups of speakers.

The Celts were the first to move across Europe, they were originally from the north of The Alps in central Europe. The ones who settled in Ireland and Scotland spoke Goidelic (Gaelic) and those who went to southern England and Wales spoke Brytonic o British. But through time many civilizations invaded Britain.

After the Celts the Roman settled for almost 400 years, mostly in what is now England, they introduced Latin mostly in the upper classes, and many new ideas of life which included police, roads, baths and theatres.

In AD 449, the Jutes from modern Denmark, settled in southern Britain and the Angles who came from Denmark too, settled in eastern Britain. After in 477 the Saxons, from Germany, arrived and settled in southern and south eastern Britain. On the contrary from the Romans who did not took the lands of the Celts these new three groups did. Unlike other invaders the Anglo-Saxons kept their own language they only took some words and kept on using Old English which by that time have many Germanic words. By the end of the seventh century all the seven Anglo-Saxon kingdoms become Christian, because of the arrival of Augustine and many monks.

Later in the eighteen century Vikings arrived the islands, they came from Denmark and Norway; and they stole gold and silver from towns and churches on the north cost and they destroyed many important Christian centers of learning.

After many years of battles the Anglo-Saxon king Alfred won against the Vikings and divided Britain in two. In order to restored the learning centers he decided to make English the language for education and literature. So books were translated into old English from Latin. Old Norse, the language of the Vikings, ended up mixing with Old English after many years of living together closely.

At the battle of Hastings on October 1066, King Harold was killed and his army defeated by the Normans. The language during this period had little changed; French became the language only for the governing classes like The Government, The Church, The Law and Literature and remained so for two hundred years. With the time English become more widely spoken because Normans married with English people and their children spoke English. After the Hundred Years Wars, problems between England and France grew and the nationality feeling was shown by the use of English as a national language. Lots of people died because of the Black Death and many churchmen, monks and school teachers were replaced by less educated people who spoke English. So French was less and less spoken and understood. When Henry the Fourth became king in 1399, England had his first English-Speaking King since 1066.

Middle English

English changed grammatically in the next four centuries that followed the Norman Conquest. Grammar grew simpler losing some of the endings for nouns, adjectives and pronouns. The past tense was simpler for most verbs even the ones that have entered the language from French. In Middle English other tenses developed; to express future for example shall and will; for perfect tenses have, for passive be and also for the continuous tenses. The order of the words also changed. Most these changes were possible because very little was written in English from 1066 until the end of the fifteen century. Many French and Latin words came into Middle English, the Latin ones mainly because they could not be translated. Phonetic changes were made and the spelling of the words changed into simpler ones. The greater writer of this period was Geoffrey Chaucer who was a poet and an important government official. In the fifteen century the printing machine was brought to England by William Caxton in 1476 this had a great effect on English.

Modern English begins

The sixteen century was a time of changes in Europe as Europeans began to explore the Americas, Asia, and Africa. At the begging of this period Latin was the language of learning in all Europe mostly by The Rich.

It was the printing machine

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