“The Story of English” is a 9 part documentary aired by PBS and narrated by Robert MacNeil…it traces the origins of English to Frisian, the small chain of sandbar islands off the coast of Holland, by professional/academic linguists. It then follows the evolution of English to its modern form, particularly American Standard, with comparisons to modern British English…I highly recommend watching it if you can find it on PBS or U tube…English grammar is Germanic… our verb tenses have been simplified so that the same form is used for express other tenses, which in Germanic of Latin derived languages, like French would have separate verb forms…but these verb tenses are still there, only hidden. Old English, pre Chaucer, is very difficult to read because it is so Germanic. The invasion of Germanic tribes after the fall of the Roman Empire, brought old Saxon German, Angle German, (hence anglo-saxon) along with other variations of German, displacing the Celtic languages, that still survive in Ireland, and to a far lesser extent in Wales, and Scotland and Brittany in France… The Isle of Manx has resurrected thier form of Celtic just recently…after nearly going completely extinct… English itself nearly went extinct with the Norman conquest, that established Norman French as the official language, but it survived among the serfs and peasantry… English has taken so many Norman French words into it’s lexicon so that English vocabulary is twice as big as French, German, Spanish and other western european languages. Automated linguistic programs that aren’t sophisticated enough will classify English as a Romance Language simply based on the abundance of French and French derived words in our vocabulary…English began to take it’s modern form during the 15th century… Shakespeare is easily understood…The evolution of modern English which has become the international language of business and commerce followed the expansion of the British Empire…English continued to flourish because of American power supplanting British power world wide, and has become Americanized…there are 1.13 billion English speakers world wide. Mandarin Chinese is a very close second. Spanish is in 5th place after Hindi and Bengali, with 580 million native speakers of Spanish. The other leading languages are because of the size of the population. English as a second language is taught nearly universally world wide… that includes all of Western Europe, but also China and Japan. It has become the universal language of not only business and commerce but also science and technology. As such, the US is monolingual…that’s somewhat of a pity, as other countries, especially in Western Europe and bi and trilingual…languages carries with it culture, and it’s a shame that we are so insular and unknowing about other languages and cultures.
