Where did the English language come from? Why do words have silent letters? Why do some people have accents? Why do some words sound similar? Answers to all of your questions about English and words with sociolinguist Erica Brozovsky, host of a PBS digital show called Otherwords.
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- English was not developed by one person. It was developed and changed by the people who spoke it and it continues to change today.
- English first originated in Britain, when Anglo-Saxon settlers from other parts of Europe in the 5th-7th centuries. These settlers developed a language we now call Old English.
- We speak Modern English. They spoke Old English. A language we refer to as Middle English came in between!
- What about the letters we use? Well, those are much older. About four thousand years ago, workers in ancient Egypt came up with an alphabetic script that was adapted from hieroglyphics in order to write down their language. That script developed into the Phoenician [say: foh-NEE-shin] alphabet. Then the Phoenicians took their alphabet to Greece, and then it spread to Italy and inspired the Latin alphabet.
- English started with a different alphabet, a Runic alphabet called the futhark. But around the 600s it was replaced with the Latin alphabet.
- Before we had reliable dictionaries, people spelled things any way that felt right to them, and maybe even spelled the same word different ways every time they wrote it! (Hashtag: CHAOTIC) There was no official right way to write a word.
- But then people developed the printing press, and words could be written down and passed out to more than one place. One of the books that was printed was the dictionary, which standardized the spelling of all the words it contained.
- English is a particularly difficult language to learn, in large part because the language has so many exceptions to every “rule.” Think of the common guide to spelling words with an I and an E. You might have been taught, “I before E, except after C.” But it turns out there are a LOT of words where the E comes first, but there’s no C. Like neighbor or weigh.
- It’s complicated, because English has a lot of influences from other languages. SO many of our words and grammar come from different languages. So our language is a blend of lots of other ways of speaking, writing and spelling.
