As an author, I’m fascinated by the English language with all its quirky words, strange spellings and vast vocabulary which gives writers such a wealth of words that we can describe a single mood in so many ways without repeating ourselves. For example, from my window, I can see the day is murky, cheerless, dismal, gloomy, drab, sullen, misty, drizzly, damp, grey, etc. But how has this come about?
If we were to travel back in
time to, say, sixth century England, we would hear our forebears, the
Anglo-Saxon peoples, speaking a language which sounds nothing like modern
English. If we understand German, there may be a few more similarities in the
sound of the language but, even so, it’s quite different. They are speaking Old
English, a West Germanic language used in England between the fifth and twelfth
centuries. The people call their language Aenglisc,
[pronounced: Enn-glish] and their home is Aengelcynn or Englaland.
Some interesting words change
over time to become quite unrecognisable and hlaf has a fascinating story to tell. The word originally meant ‘loaf’, the ‘h’ sounded softly [and eventually
dropped], followed by ‘laaff’, and this is how the Anglo-Saxons referred to
bread and also to food in general. Surprisingly, hlaf had other uses too. The head of the household was the hlaf-weard or loaf-warden and anyone who
ate the food was a hlaf-aeta. The woman
of the house was the hlaefdige or
loaf-kneader, using the feminine form and where dige became our modern ‘dough’. Hlaf-weard
evolved, losing ‘h’ and ‘f’, running the words together so it sounded like
‘lahrd, then the Scots ‘laird’ and, ultimately, ‘lord’. So that grand title
originally meant the guy in charge of the food. Hlaefdige went through similar changes, dropping letters and with
‘g’ pronounced as ‘y’, to become ‘lady’.
But across the land, the
language may have sounded quite different because there were not only the
Angles and the Saxons, but Jutes, Frisians, Swedes and maybe other groups from
Europe. Also, there were the Roman Britons who had remnants of the Celtic
language, spoken before the Romans arrived in 43AD, to which Latin had been
added. So people were speaking different languages and using various dialects
with many different words for the same thing. And then the Vikings arrived to
add to the mix yet they all need to communicate with each other and this aspect
led to English evolving in a unique way.
Like its original tongue,
Anglo-Saxon, and other Germanic languages, Old English had male, female and
neuter genders in words and was an inflected language, so words changed
according to their position, whether a noun was the subject or the object of a
sentence, for example. Latin has six singular and six plural versions of a
noun, depending on whether it’s the subject or object, if it’s being spoken to
directly, or if it possesses something, is over, under or on something else or
moving, etc. But in modern English, a table is a table, whatever position it
has in a sentence and it has no gender so that’s irrelevant to any adjective
used to describe it. If you’ve studied most other European languages based on
Latin, such as French, Spanish or Italian, you’ll know how complicated they can
be. Likewise, the Germanic languages are equally tricky. Of course, modern
English suffers from quirky, awkward spelling and a few irregular verbs, like
‘to be’ which is a nasty one, but the genders and declensions of nouns are
gone. Why did Old English lose most of its inflections?
A lot of unpleasantness is
often blamed on the Vikings but it’s because of them that English dropped many
of its complications. There came a time when half of England was known as the
Danelaw when most of the eastern side of England, north of London and the River
Thames – both Celtic words, in case you were wondering – was occupied by the
Danes with their own language, laws and customs. They were no longer marauding
Vikings but – mostly – peaceful, having settled down to farm the land and trade
with their neighbours.
But it’s difficult to do
business with people you can’t understand and so a new language began to
evolve, incorporating both English and Danish words. The grammar of the two didn’t
have a lot in common and genders clashed so frequently – whether a cartwheel was
masculine, feminine or neuter, did it really matter when you needed yours
mended, urgently? – that they were set aside.
Did you know that whether you’re angry with your husband or give him a hug, whether there is a gale blowing or fog outside, if you give a guest you don’t trust a kick on the leg or toss him out the window, you can’t do any of these things without using Old Danish words adopted into English. (Words of Danish origin are underlined.)
The language we call English
today is actually a hybrid with thousands of Danish words, along with Latin
from the Church, Norman French from William the Conqueror’s gang, Hindi from
the time Britain was big in India and a whole assortment of vocabulary from all
over the world.
Sometimes, both the English and
Danish words remain in use but take on slightly different meanings, for
example, the Old English scyrte is a
short, loose garment worn by men and women or as we say ‘shirt’. But Old Danish
has skirt to describe the same item
of clothing which we now use for the longer lower half of a garment.
With modern English having evolved from so many other languages and with Hallowe’en coming up
we mustn’t forget ‘ghastly ghosts’ – the ‘gh’ at the beginning of a word coming from Dutch – no wonder our spelling is so weird – OE ‘wyrd’ meaning ‘destiny’, so that’s odd in itself – and sometimes seems plain silly. One of our strangest quirks is ‘gh’ at the end of a word, as in cough [coff], dough [doh], plough [plow], rough [ruff], daughter [dawter], caught [cawt], etc. Originally, this ‘gh’ was a sound like clearing your throat, as in the Scottish loch but what’s a little variety between friends?
So now you’ve heard something about
how our language English has come to be, perhaps you can forgive us our
illogical spellings and pronunciation because they all made sense once upon a
time.
Toni Mount is the best-selling author of several non-fiction history books which concentrate on the ordinary lives of people from history. Her latest book is How To Survive in Anglo-Saxon England
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