The Adventure of English - Birth of A Language

The Adventure of
English - Birth of a
Language
2,000 years ago, if you'd heard a human voice around
South Bank in London, the language would have been
incomprehensible. 1,000 years ago, the English
language had established its first base camp. Today
English circles the globe.
English has the characteristics of a bold and successful
adventure: tenacity, luck, dazzling flexibility, and an
extraordinary power to absorb. And it's still going on.
New dialects, new
Englishes are evolving
all the time, all over
the world.
For 300 years, English was forced underground.
In this programme we'll travel through time, to explore
how English in the 21st century has become the
international language of business, the language in
which the world's citizens communicate. Over the last
1,500 years, the United Kingdom has achieved much
that is remarkable. But England's greatest success story
of all is the English language.
This is where we can begin,

on a flat shore by the
North Sea, in what we
now call the Netherlands.
This is Friesland, and it's in this part of the world that
we can still hear the modern language that we believe
sounds closest to what the ancestor of English sounded
like 1,500 years ago. Some of the words might sound
familiar, like:
«three» and «four»
«frost» and «freeze»
«mist» and «blue»
The reason we can
recognize these words is
that modern Frisian and
modern English can both
be traced back to the
same family.
• The Germanic family of languages, and some words have stayed
more or less the same down the centuries.
• The West Germanic tribes who invented these words were a
warlike, adventurous people. They'd been on the move through
Europe for the best part of 1,000 years and now had settlements
in what we would call the lowlands of northern Europe...Holland,
Germany, and Denmark.
• This is the island of Terschelling. The English coast is about 250
miles to the southwest. It is from these islands and the low-lying
Frisian mainland that, in the 5th century, a Germanic tribe...part
of the family that also contained Jutes, Angles, and Saxons
...made sail to look for a better life.
• More than 500 years before, the Romans had
also come by sea to impose their will.
• This is Pevensey Castle, an ancient Roman
fort that used to stand on the very shoreline of
the south coast.
• The Celts and their language were pushed to the
margins. Only a handful of words from the
Celtic languages survive into modern English.
• By the end of the 6th century, these Germanic
tribes occupied half of mainland Britain. They
had divided into a number of kingdoms:
• Kent, Sussex, Essex, and Wessex, denoting the
settlements of southern, eastern, and western
Saxon tribes; East Anglia, named after the
Angles who gave England its name; Mercia in
midlands; Northumbria in the north.
Anglo- Saxon Kingdoms
The Germanic tribes, now settled around the country,
all spoke their own dialects. From among them would
emerge one language - Anglo-Saxon or Old English.
In the language there are hundreds of words from a
language over 1500 years old, key words ranging from
the names we give family members to numbers. Most of
those words were from Old English, nouns like “youth”,
“son”, “daughter”, “field”, “friend”, “home”, and “ground”,
prepositions like “in” and “on”, “into”, “by”, and “from”,
all the numbers and verbs like “drink”, “come”, and “go”,
“sing”, “like”, and “love”.
However, these words sound a little different. The Old
English for “sun” is “sunu”, for the word “game” is
“gamen”, “ground” is “grund”.
Introduction of Christianity
A most important role in the history of the English language was
played by the introduction of Christianity.
In 597, the monk and prior Augustine led a mission from Rome to
Kent. At the same time, Irish monks of the Celtic church were
affirming a presence in the north. Within a century, Christians
built a lot of churches and monasteries. Faith and stone weren’t
the only things the Christian missionaries brought to the country.
They brought the international language of the Christian religion.
Latin
Latin terms became part of the English
vocabulary. Such words as “Altare” (which
became “altar”), “apostolus” (which became
“apostle”), “mass”, “monk”, and “verse” and many
others all come from the Latin.
Runes
And from Latin English took its script, runes.
The runic alphabet was made up of symbols
formed mainly of straight lines so that the letters
could be carved into stone or wood.
Those were their media, rather than parchment

or paper. Though this is a short poem, most
examples of runic writing that survive suggest
runes were mainly used for short, practical
messages or graffiti.
The Latin was different: it could be easily written
using pen and ink thanks to its curves and bows.
Christianity brought the book to these shores. The
Lindisfarne Gospels were
created in the 8th century.
At the monastery of St. Paul’s
in Jarrow the great English
monk and scholar Bede
began writing in Latin
the 1st history of the
English-speaking people.
Now O.E. was written down using Latin
alphabet and with some insertions of the old
runes as letters. With writing, O.E. stole a march
on other languages spoken in Europe at the
time.
“Beowulf”
• the author is unknown;
• it is written between the
mid 7th and end of the 10th
century;
• the 1st great poem in
English;
• the poem celebrates the
glory days of the Germanic
tribes, epitomized in the
heroic warrior Beowulf.
Language features in "Beowulf"
• a wonderful sense of the indicative mood all through it
• it’s terrific for action, terrific for description
• the words are very clear and direct
• beautiful words for instruments:
a) the harp is called "gleo-beam", the glee beam, the happy
wood, or else the joy wood
b) swords or shields (the shield is the war-board, "wig-bord")
• there are 40,000 words recorded in "Beowulf"
• it’s written to be read aloud
• at that time, no other language in the Christian world could
match the achievement of the "Beowulf" poet and his
anonymous contemporaries.
Old English was flourishing.
The adventure was under way. But while the seeds of English had come
from these Frisian shores in the 5th century, so, now, in the late 8th
century, a potential destroyer was preparing his battle fleet 500 miles or
so to the north. In the
late 8th century,
the Latin-based culture
of scholarship, which
had grown up in places
Like Lindisfarne and
which had also been
the cradle of Old
English, faced
extinction from
across the sea.

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The Adventure of

This is where we can begin,

Those were their media, rather than parchment

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