The English Language: Where Did It Come From?
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🇬🇧Fiery dragons, unruly spelling, and fierce invaders? Grab a paper and get ready to take notes. This is the story of English you were never told in school!
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⏱ TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 – Intro
0:16 – What is English?
0:51 – Celts and Romans
1:50 – Germanic Tribes
2:36 – Old English
4:25 – Vikings
6:09 – Writing
7:16 – Middle English
9:20 – Late Middle English
12:03 – Sword and Sorcery Tales
12:36 – Early Modern English
13:44 – Enter William Shakespeare
15:11 – The Academy Attempt
16:23 – Late Modern English
17:06 – Alphabet and Pronunciation
17:52 – Astonishing Things
📜 SOURCES & ATTRIBUTIONS:
🎬 Video Clips:
Do You Understand the Words That Are Coming Out of My Mouth? – Rush Hour (1/5) Movie CLIP (1998) HD
The Ancient Celtic Languages
What Was Life like in Medieval England?
Cædmon's Hymn 🎵 (Sung in Old English)
Beowulf (Old English)
How the Normans changed the history of Europe – Mark Robinson
Where did English come from? – Claire Bowern
General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales (Premiere)
What Shakespeare's English Sounded Like – and how we know
Original Pronunciation – Hamlet | To Be, or not to be… | Ben Crystal
The Queens English
🖼 Images:
“Claudius crop” by Marie-Lan Nguyen is licensed under CC BY 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons
“RP English Monophthongs Chart” by RP_vowel_chart is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Very fascinating topic. I loved the presentation
hi Oliver. Amanda here. Actually, my YouTube handle is flute player 86. By the way, my apologies for calling you by your actual name. Your nickname OLLY does not come out right and text for some reason. Anyway, my ancestry is welsh, Irish, French, and German. your content on your videos is really interesting. I especially like the ones having to do with Star Wars. Those are cool.
Fantastic video! Helpful for my “history of the English Language” class!
This is an awesome channel! And are you serious? The story language learning thing is free?!?
The kit to learn how to use the story learning is free. The actual story learning courses are not.
I think English is taken for granted most of the times. It’s a really beautiful and unique language but people don’t give it enough credit just because it’s common and heard everywhere
Agreed. Also, many people learn it because the have to, not because they want to.
Interesting thought!
Yes people generally look down on English and English is becoming more like a pidgin again
English is, in my opinion, the ugliest language i learnt, it’s subjective really
Most entertaining. A pity there are so many facts that I find it difficult to remember. The beauty, however, is one can always rewind and also watch again later. Thanks for the info.
And use that pause button a lot, haha 😉
One English word with one of the most interesting etymology is the word “girl”. The word girl first appeared in English around 1300 and it originally meant “child of either gender” or “young person”. Meaning that both male children and female children were called “girls”. It wasn’t until the 1400s when the word boy came into English and only female children were called girls. In modern times we still use the word “girl” to refer to adult young women. So in a way the world girl still retains that original meaning of “young person”.
Interesting note about girl being a gender-neutral word. I have been studying German, a language with noun genders, and the German word for girl, Mädchen, is a gender neutral word. I wonder if there is a connection.
@sweiland75 No, the neuter gender comes from the -chen suffix.
@sweiland75 Like the other person said, it comes from the -chen (diminutive). We have “der Hund” (masculine, “the dog”), but “das Hündchen” (neuter, “the small dog). An other such suffix is -lein. “Die Frau” (woman) – “Das Fräulein” (the young woman – similar to madame and mademoiselle).
Also the word “Mädchen” is the diminutive of “die Magd”, wich is related to English “maiden”.
I speak English and Spanish. Two world languages with fascinating histories.
Me too I speak both only missing Chinese to speak the 3 most widely spoken
This is so interesting and I have really enjoyed this one💜
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What about Scots?
Not exactly accurate. You made a few mistakes, over simplified and glossed over some other points. Nice overview though.
Wow,
my love of Spanish and language learning has me learning about my own language English, and I’m fascinated by this thing I’ve always taken for granted
The massive amounts of accents is interesting. Many other languages don’t have the hundreds if not thousands of accents that English does. I imagine it makes learn it a bit challenging as just because you might understand Americans, you might not understand British or Indian English speakers very well at all.
Great video, I learned a lot from it.
One theory is that English sort of “originated” from the Scandinavian language spoken by the Jutes and as the Jutes came in to contact with the Anglo Saxons, the language spoken by the Jutes adopted the WORDS of the Anglo Saxons but the Syntax of the Jutes language still remained! This theory is based off of the fact that the syntax of English is so similar to modern Scandinavian languages, and the fact that although WORDS are very commonly borrowed, syntax is not! Which would suggest that this theory of Anglo Saxon words replacing the words in the Jute language is an, at the very least, very plausible theory!
I think I got that right at least 🤔😅
Sun day is named for the sun
Monday is named for the moon
Tuesday is named for Tyre, the Norse god of war
Wednesday is named for Oden, the all father
Thursday is named for Thor, the protector of Asgard
Friday is named for Frye, the Norse god of beauty fertility and cats
Saturday is named for Saturn, the roman name for Zeus
Excellent presentation, Olly!
Some of this was covered, coincidentally, way back in high school German class. However, since it was designed to help students understand the history and development of the German language, the English portion was mostly glossed over while emphasizing the vowel shifts and changes in both.The migration of tribes, invasions and other influences makes for a fascinating study.
Also, most grammatical errors that are common among American speakers have their roots in England.
This is a wonderful history of the English language! Thanks for doing all this research.
I can’t wait to share all this information with my EFL students.
One of the most contentious Americanisms that was originally British is “soccer” (it’s actually North American, since it’s the word used in Canada as well). At Oxford, students took the portmanteau “assoccer” (association football) and shortened it to “soccer.” The term was adopted in the United States but forgotten in the UK.
Good video, Olly. However, it seems like a missed opportunity not to mention Frisian or, at the very least, Dutch. Its connection is closer than German which was the chosen cognate to demonstrate links with a modern language. The level of intelligibility between the two languages, even after all the grammatical shifts and additional romance vocabulary, is striking! Have a look at Eddie Izzard’s attempt to chat with a Frisian dairy farmer for a laugh 😅