English Origins
Huma
Hey viewers we sometimes talk in English with our friends, we write English and the language I am writing this blog in is English. But have you ever wondered where and when this popular language came. what is its Origins? This question i shall answer today.
English Origins In Simple
Having emerged from the dialects and vocabulary of Germanic peoples—Angles, Saxons, and Jutes—who settled in Britain in the 5th century CE, English today is a constantly changing language that has been influenced by a plethora of different cultures and languages, such as Latin, French, Dutch, and Afrikaans.The history of the English language really started with the arrival of three Germanic tribes who invaded Britain during the 5th century AD.
These tribes, the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes, crossed the North Sea from what today is Denmark and northern Germany. While the continental Saxons are no longer a distinctive ethnic group or country, their name lives on in the names of several regions and states of Germany, including Lower Saxony (which includes central parts of the original Saxon homeland known as Old Saxony), Saxony in Upper Saxony, as well as Saxony-Anhalt.
Scholars attribute its origin to a little known Proto-Sinatic, Semitic form of writing developed in Egypt between 1800 and 1900 BC. Building on this ancient foundation, the first widely used alphabet was developed by the Phoenicians about seven hundred years later.Old English – the earliest form of the English language – was spoken and written in Anglo-Saxon Britain from c. 450 CE until c. 1150 (thus it continued to be used for some decades after the Norman Conquest of 1066).
England and the Scottish Lowlands, countries of the United Kingdom, are the birthplace of the English language, and the modern form of the language has been being spread around the world since the 17th century, first by the worldwide influence of the United Kingdom, and more recently by that of the United States. Contrary to popular belief, Shakespeare did not write in Old or Early English. Shakespeare's language was actually Early Modern English, also known as Elizabethan English – much of which is still in use today.
Pronouns such as whom and him (contrasted with who and he), are a conflation of the old accusative and dative cases, as well as of the genitive case after prepositions (while her also includes the genitive case). This conflated form is called the oblique case or the object (objective) case, because it is used for objects of verbs (direct, indirect, or oblique) as well as for objects of prepositions. The information formerly conveyed by distinct case forms is now mostly provided by prepositions and word order. In Old English as well as modern German and Icelandic as further examples, these cases had distinct forms.Over the last 1,200 years or so, English has undergone extensive changes in its vowel system, but many fewer changes to its consonants.
