Have you ever thought about where did English, as we know it, originate? Did you ever find similarities between English and other languages?
We know languages change through time. In this case, we will go back .
The English language has many similarities to German, even though it may not be noticed. As a very limited example: some English words still do keep the most commonly used German plural marker (-en) as in children or oxen.
There are many other similarities, but there is a problem; they are hidden between many spelling, pronouncing, and other types of changes in the words that took place through the years. So, to further visualise these similarities, we will have to go many years back in time.
Before advancing, we will separate three big periods in the history of English. The first one is Old English (also known as Anglo-Saxon), from the mid-5th century to 1100 AC, approximately. Then, from there to 1600, the period of Middle English. Right now, we are in the Modern English period.
The following is an exceprt from the renowned tragedy Hamlet, by Shakespeare. It was written back in the XIX century. 1
“And leegemen to the Dane, O farewell honest souldier, who hath releeued you?”
In this example, we can recognize most of the words, but it is hardly comprehensible.
We will go back to even before. This is an excerpt from the Bible in Middle English, specifically from 1380. As it has been translated many times, it will make comparing easier.2
“And Aaman seide to the king Assuerus, A puple is scaterid bi alle the prouynces of thi rewme, and is departid fro it silf togidere, and vsith newe lawis and cerymonyes, and ferthermore it dispisith also the comaundementis of the kyng; and thou knowest best, that it spedith not to thi rewme, that it encreesse in malice bi licence. “
We can notice the using of a case system, which English once had. In case you do not know what a case system is, I will explain it briefly: languages with a case system use less prepositions in favour of modifying words to show their roles in a sentence. Generally, their ending is changed, just like verbs are modified. Take, as an example, German das (the, neuter, nominative case) and dem (the, neuter, dative case, meaning “[to] the”).
The remains of an old, common ancestor to both English and German are seen in the prior example. The modern German equivalent of this sentence is quite similar (“du willst”) and the English equivalent is “you want”. As I mentioned before, the similarities are hidden between common ancestors and are not easily seen without careful inspecting. For example, not too many centuries ago, the preferred singular second-person pronoun was “thou” (now replaced with “you” which is used both in the singular and in the plural) which is a cognate with “du”.
Regarding “willest”, the use of the verb “will” not as an auxiliary for forming the future tense but meaning “to want” still has left a trace in our modern English; as a verb, “willing to” means “wanting to”, and the noun “will” is defined as “one’s independent faculty of choice; the ability to be able to exercise one’s choice or intention.”3
Also in this text, an antique English’s complex verb conjugation (which has been profoundly simplified nowadays) is seen. In this case the ending -st, as in contemporary German, is the singular second person ending for verbs.
To further see see these connections I will clarify a common misconception and its origin; the word woman does not come from the word man and is not, thus, a descendant of that word. Its Old English ancestor, wīfmann, comes from wīf, meaning female. It is related to German Weib; while being now derogatory, it was once used regularly to mean woman.
Mann, contrarily to as in current German and English speakers’ first guessing, was used to mean human in a broad sense, a human of unspecified gender. On the other hand, the word wer was the word used for meaning man. 4
Someone who has studied Latin may notice the similarities between this word and vir, meaning roughly the same thing. Or someone who has studied Sanskrit may notice it is also similar to वीर (vīrá) which also does mean man. What do Sanskrit and English, whose homelands are at least seven thousand kilometers apart, have in common? Is it possible for them, being so far apart, to have a common ancestor? The answer is yes, the same way English found its way to Australia, which is two times farther than India to England.5
Compare Persian است (ast), Russian есtь (jest’), French est, German ist, English is, Spanish es, Italian é, Armenian է (ē), et caetera. All of those mean roughly the same. There are other similarities; but I think this one is the most noticeable, and it gives us an insight on a common ancestor of all of these Indo- European languages.
There already have been linguists who have devoted to finding the ancestor of all of these languages (in fact, comparative linguistics is a branch of linguistics that concerns comparing languages to find their historical relations6) and they have named it Proto-Indo-European. It is the mother to various families of languages, such as Indian, Italic, Germanic, Balto-Slavic, and others.
This supposed language is believed to have been spoken many centuries ago, and there are not any written texts to corroborate its existence or its vocabulary.
We will go back to our prior example; the relations of the word vir, wer, and vīrá. Their ancestor is the reconstructed word *wiHrós—the added asterisk shows it is hypotesized and not attested, and it is also believed to come from another word, *weyh, which means to chase, probably in the context of hunting. Thus, it is possible to reconstruct samples of who were the Proto-Indo-Europeans and their culture. We could suppose that their men had the role of hunting, and that it was really important for them… All of this speculating about their culture is found on the book A Reconstruction and Historical Analysis of a Proto-Language and a Proto-Culture by Thomas V. Gamkrelidze and Vjačeslav V. Ivanov.
ALl of this mixture of languages, writing systems and influences ended up making the English writing system TERRIBLE (such as in the French) and without many letter-phoneme correspondence, the reason why television shows like the Spelling Bee exist—an incomprehensible thing to speakers of Serbo-Croatian, whose writing system has an almost “perfect” correspondence between sounds and letters.
So, when does English start and when does it end? In the end, is English not a variety of the German language? At least it came from German.
All of this was to show how much can languages evolve and to show another perspective on language itself; do we have to preserve language? Does linguistic purism even make sense? AAVE is just as “correct” as “regular” English.