This is the history of the English language.
The saga of a language that wouldn't quit.
Responding to invasion after invasion
by snagging the conqueror's most useful words
streamlining their grammar and becoming today's
linguistic super power.
Conquerors and conquered living together
blended their languages.
The result is a language that has doubled
the vocabulary of any other language.
Today, more people learn English
as a second language than any other.
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10,000 years ago when the last ice age was ending
and ice was retreating global sea levels
were 400 feet lower than today.
Back then, you could've walked from Denmark to Britain
without getting your feet wet.
Across a flat plain that has since been called Doggerland,
but as global sea levels slowly rose,
Doggerland began to disappear beneath the waves,
and the people retreated.
They called themselves Pretani,
from which we get the name Britain.
Nomadic hunter gatherers who roamed across it
spoke a language that was probably the forerunner of Celtic,
which would've sounded something like this.
It took almost 100 years of fierce fighting
before the Romans finally gained control
of the land they called Britannia.
Of course the Romans brought their language with them.
Latin, which sounded something like this.
By 400 AD, Rome was collapsing,
and a thuggish bunch of obscure Germanic tribes
were looting their way through Europe.
People were actually scavenging in Roman ruins
to get the last few remnants of Roman consumer goods.
So economically it was absolute devastation.
Some of them turned their eyes
to a large island known as Britannia,
opening the door to a flood on invaders
that would change British history forever.
Over time, Jutes migrated from Northern Denmark,
Angles from Southern Denmark, and Saxons from Germany.
In 600 AD, Christianity began to return to Britannia
for the first time since Roman times,
and spread religion and literacy throughout the land.
Unlike the occupying Romans, these invading Germanic tribes
were also true immigrants who quickly settled
into their adopted home.
It was long thought that the invaders
exterminated the Celts and their language,
replacing Celtic with old English or Anglo-Saxon.
With traditional stories that they drove
all the Celts to the border so that the Celts ended up
in Scotland, and you know, the outer edges of Scotland,
and in Wales, in Cornwall, but in fact a lot of Celts
did stay behind and they intermarried
with the Germanic tribes.
We know this now from archeological evidence,
from biological evidence, you know genetic evidence.
There was a lot of Celtic blood
in England proper these days.
The linguistic influence, however, is very very small.
Apart from places names there's a lot of place name evidence
because the names for any kind of towns, rivers, mountains
would often stay the same and this is a typical thing.
By the seventh century,
the tribes had settled seven separate kingdoms
who battled each other for the control
of the place later called Englaland.
It was a time when reading and writing flourished,
particularly under Alfred the Great who reigned
as King of Wessex toward the end of the ninth century.
He was determined that people should be literate in English.
One of the unusual things about England in this period
is there's so much written in the vernacular,
which was not the case on the continent at all.
So you have beautiful works of English.
This is the period where the Beowulf manuscript is written,
and that's the most important work
of English in the whole period.
Beowulf, set in sixth century Scandinavia
is the oldest surviving long poem in Old English.
Well, it is the quintessential statement
of the Anglo-Saxon warrior ethos.
So this is the hero fighting against the monster,
trying to stave off the forces of chaos and darkness,
and of course he can't.
He dies in the end fighting the dragon,
and that's pretty much the Anglo-Saxon world view.
The dragon is going to do you in eventually,
but people will sing your fame forever.
Beowulf is the most important surviving Old English poem
and it is a heroic poem that
it's a bit over 3,000 lines long
and it is the one thing that people tend to think of
when they think of great works in Old English.
But there are many other great works, too,
and much of what we know about the history of Britain
comes from this time period,
and from the Anglo-Saxon chronicles,
which were begun in the reign of King Alfred
in the ninth century and continued to be written
through the 12th century by different groups of monks
in different monasteries and so we have examples
of interesting events during these times,
but one really important event for British history
is recorded in 793.
And the language spoken at the time
would've sounded something like this.
The heathen man were the vikings.
They came from Sweden, Norway, and Denmark,
and they inhabited a region in the north of England mostly
for about 200 years.
Their language was Old Norse,
which was a relative of Old English,
and the closest relative of Old Norse
in contemporary days now is Icelandic.
The linguistic impact is huge
because we have this very substantial body of words
that come into English from the Vikings
because so many Scandinavians settled in England
and lived alongside the English
that a lot of words got borrowed into English from Danish,
and we're still using a lot of these words today.
Vind auga which means wind-eye
which became window in modern English.
Rannasaka which means house-search became Ransack.
Berserkr which means bear-shirt became berserk.
Husbondi which means house-dweller
which became husband in modern English.
So for two centuries then,
the Danes and the Anglo-Saxons lived together
especially in this north and eastern area of England.
They mingled, they married, and the Anglo-Saxon language
absorbed many words from Old Norse
including some of our most common words,
they and their, them, but also many of the SK words
in the English language like skill or ski.
Then in the 11th century, however,
the language received another important jolt really
through a historical event.
The invasion by the King of Norway,
which is recorded in the Anglo-Saxon chronicle.
Harold Godwinson King raises north to Stamford
and defeats the King of Norway and kills him,
and then it's all good right,
except that at that very moment,
William the Conqueror is landing in the south.
And slowly but surely through attrition,
the shield wall of soldiers at the top of the hill
where the Anglo-Saxons were was weakened,
and that's when finally one last charge was successful,
and the Anglo-Saxon King Harold was killed during the battle
and with that the game was over.
If Harold Godwinson had not had to go north
and defeat the Scandinavian ruler,
he would've been well placed to met the threat
from William in the south.
So without that other invasion,
the Norman conquest probably would not have succeeded.
King Harold's defeat marked the end
of the Anglo-Saxon period and the beginning
of the Norman conquest.
The term Norman comes from Norsemen,
which is the term for those who inhabited
the northern part of France which hadn't been itself
invaded by the vikings but when William came over,
and he replaced the aristocracy existing then
with his own people and the language spoken
at the top was then a dialect of French.
So there was then a tri-lingle society
with French being spoken by the king
and court in aristocracy and Latin being used by the church
and in administrative realms,
and then English used by everybody else.
So at this point, English is still continuing
to absorb to itself other languages, and during this period,
it's estimated that about 10,000 words from French
were picked up and absorbed into English.
The change to English due to
the Norman conquest is enormous.
English was already becoming the language of the people,
and this actually speeds up language change,
and then you get this huge influx
of words from Norman French, and so that's why we basically
have a huge vocabulary in English.
We have a vocabulary twice the size
of most other European languages
because we have two words for everything.
We have a Germanic word and a French word
for almost anything.
The French words tended towards aristocratic
and courtly things such as crown, castle, prince, duke.
Lowly tradesmen still went by their Anglo-Saxon terms
like shoemaker and baker while more esteemed tradesmen
enjoyed French names like tailor and merchant,
and food on the hoof kept his Anglo-Saxon farm names
like cow, calf, and swine but once it reached
the high class table, it was the French beef, veal and pork.
The largest portion of words in English
are in fact of romance origin from Latin or French.
The most common ones, however, are Old English.
If you look at, let's say,
the 100 most common words in English,
the majority of those are from Old English,
including all the ones that we would find
the most familiar short words
that are part of our language.
These are words that have been part of the language
as long as it has been spoken as English.
Words like bad and good and for body parts,
from head to foot, words like love and strong,
and road and apple.
These are all from Old English.
These are words that have been a part
of the language as long as it has been spoken as English.
Now in terms of literature, that's where the English excel
because they produce people like Sir Geoffrey Chaucer
who is the great poet of this period.
He made a blend between English and French vocabulary
a normal part of the English literary scene.
Whose best known work of Chaucer's is
of course The Canterbury Tales,
and in this work Chaucer does something
with the language, too.
He sets himself up to have stories told by characters
from all ranks of society and in doing that
brings in this richness that represents, you know,
the state of English at this time.
Sir Chaucer was writing in more or less a London English,
a southern English and that's the English
that led to what we speak nowadays,
so it is still very different, but if you look at Chaucer,
you will recognize many of the words.
You will understand the grammatical patterns in general.
The general prologue of The Canterbury Tales
describes the beautiful spring morning
in which Chaucer falls in with a group of Sundry folk,
making a religious pilgrimage to Canterbury.
So the opening lines here are so fresh.
That fresh spring opening is leading forth
into this collection of stories
that's so varied and diverse.
It's also a kind of fresh opening
for English literature at this time.
Middle English by Chaucer's time
was changing so rapidly in different parts of the country
that many Englishman from the north could not understand
their compatriots in the south of the country,
but the dominance of London meant
that London English became Chaucer's English
and eventually fully modern English.
Chaucer's manuscript circulated quite widely.
We know that and many manuscripts are again
the handwritten copies of literary text and other text,
but a major event was to happen in the mid 15th century
with the invention of the printing press.
The printing press meant that writing was available
to many more people and that is generally
true throughout Europe.
There was a much more widespread access
to writing of all kinds.
So when a bright young playwright named William Shakespeare
began to make a name for himself later in the 16th century,
he had an audience who could understand what he was saying.
Had Shakespeare been born 80 years
before he was born in 1564,
we probably wouldn't be talking about him today.
He arrived just in time for the success of the printed book,
and he arrived just in time for professional theater,
which meant that people would be able to hear his words,
the words of his actors without necessarily
having to travel to a court setting,
or some kind of elite environment of performance.
Friends, Romans, Countryman, lend me your ears.
I come to bury Cesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them.
The good is oft interred with their bones.
So let it be with Cesar.
It was a form of entertainment
that really hadn't been in England.
There'd been Roman theaters 1,000 years earlier,
but this was a new initiative.
It was a new media form.
This story shall the good man teach his son.
And Crispin Crispy and shall near go by
from this day to the ending of the world,
but we in it shall be remember it.
We few, we happy few.
We band of brothers.
For he today that sheds his blood with me
shall be my brother.
Be ye near so vile this day shall gentle his condition.
And gentlemen in England now a bed shall think themselves
a curse they were not here and hold their manhoods cheap
while any speak that fought with us
upon Saint Crispin's Day.
Yeah.
It's often said that Shakespeare coined
some very very large number of words,
you know, thousands of words.
Very large numbers are thrown around,
and people use examples of these different words
that Shakespeare coined.
To us looking at his plays,
sometime you feel like a bird watcher.
You're keeping your eye for these really rare odd creatures.
I can think of Shakespeare writing entire scenes
so that he gets to use a word in a new way
because he loves it and his audience loves it.
We're finding out that a lot things
that we thought Shakespeare's the first user of
in fact were in use earlier by other people,
which is no slight on Shakespeare.
It doesn't mean he was not a great author.
It just means that he's not the only author
to write in English at that time.
I think that's just terrific
because even if Shakespeare's word count goes down,
his creativity and cunning goes up.
You know, he was like I think he was like a magpie.
He just kept his eyes out for very clever things
that people were saying and then he would just steal it.
Shakespeare was a terrific thief
in that part of his creativity was in keeping an eye out
for things that he could just say I'll take that.
Just think about the world Shakespeare
is beginning to work in.
He's got global trade beginning.
The beginnings of science.
Incredible religious tension.
This was a period of great growth
in the English vocabulary.
Again, even more words coming in from romance languages,
increasing trade with other countries,
so an influence of words from Dutch
or German coming into English.
We have the sense right now,
and this is a very important thing.
People say like, well, right now we have
all these words coming in from the internet
and this is a huge influence of life.
We've never seen anything like this before.
Well, 50 years ago were saying the space program,
you know, so important.
We have never seen an influence
like this in language before.
100 years before that railways.
You know, it was incredible,
technological development we've never seen.
In fact, the farther you go back,
the more you see that in fact technology
has always been an extremely important part of English.
There was technological innovation.
There was increasing explorations,
so words associated with other very distant cultures.
You know, including wide range in both cultural things
and physical descriptions and names for animals
from other places that were just being discovered,
and these were all being written about.
So the scruffy dialects
of the Anglo-Saxon brutes that survived
the Vikings pummeling and the Normans invasion
was now freely moving about the world
growing and gorging on new words
as the British empire spread to the corners of the world.
It was also importing a hoard
of unexpected treasures, words.
The modern English enjoys the rich
and extensive vocabulary it does now
because it's been so flexible throughout its history.
Like a snowball rolling down a hill,
it's just absorbed useful words into it,
and it's been very capacious and flexible.
The result is a language that has adopted words
from just about every era of civilization
in every country in the world.
From Latin which comprises almost 30% of our vocabulary.
From French also accounting for nearly 30% of our words.
Germanic words are the source
of over a quarter of our vocabulary,
and include those that originated
during the Norse and Old English era.
Greek words.
Arabian words.
Indian words.
Chinese words.
And a surprising large number of everyday words
come from proper names.
So we are in a globally connected world
where English is the lingua franca.
So in the realm of science or technology
or for practical purposes for medicine and for literature,
and for communication of all kinds.
Of course English is the language
that we can count on to be spoken
in more places in the world than ever.
Well I think that the future of the language is good.
You know, there are a lot of interesting things
that are going to keep happening.
We will keep absorbing words from different cultures.
There will be technological innovations.
And its evolution continues everyday.
I wonder what the Celts, or Julius Cesar, or the Vikings,
King Alfred, William the Conqueror, Geoffrey Chaucer,
or William Shakespeare would have made of this.
In case you were wondering, here's a translation,
but then you knew that, didn't you?
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