English Explained !

 Exploring English !

We often think about of it as a Single language but what do the dialects spoken in the dozens of countries around the world have in common with each other Or with the writings of chaucer and how any of them are related to starnge words in beowulf the answer is that like most languages .

English has evolved through generations of speakers undergoing major changes over time by undoing these changes we can trace the languages from the present day back to its ancient roots while modern language english shares many similar words with latin derived romance languages like french and spanish most of those were not originally part of it instead they started coming into language with the Norman invasion of England in 1066.

When the French speaking normans conquered England and became its ruling class they brought their speech with them adding a massive amount of latin and French vocabulary to the english language previously spoken there today we call that Old English this is the language of Beowulf .

It probably doesn't look familiar but it be more recognizable if you know some German thats because old english belongs to the germanic language family first brought to the british isles in the 5th and 6th centuries by the Angles,Saxons and Jutes the germanic dialogues they spoke would became known as Anglo saxon viking invaders to the 8th and 11th centuries added more borrowings from the Old norse into the mix it may be hard to see the roots of modern english underneath all the words borrowed from the french,Latin and old norse and other languages. But comparative linguistics can help us by focusing on grammatical structure patterns of sound changes and certain core vocabulary .

The various Romance languages descended from latin,English,swedish and many other languages descended from their own common ancestor known as proto Germanic spoken around 500 B.C.E because this historical language never return down we can only reconstruct it by comparing its descendants which is possible thanks to the consistency of the changes we can even use the same process to go back one step further amd trace the origins of proto germanic to a language called proto indo european spoken about 6000 years ago on the pontic steppe in modern day Ukraine and Russia this is the reconstructed ancestor of the indo european family that includes nearly all languages historically spoken in europe  as well as a large part of Southern Asia and though it requires a bit more work we can find same systematic similarities or correspondences between related words in different european branches.

But the amazing fact that remains that nearly 3 billion people around the world many of whom cannot understand are nevertheless speaking the same words shaped by the 6000 years of history.